"Don't you have enough to worry about?"

Well, apparently NOT.

I have a new theory about me. I think I am addicted to stress and anxiety. If I don't have enough at home I will get worked up over something else. I'm just one sick puppy. What follows is evidence of that neurosis. Be afraid.

How other than insanity can I explain addiction to the 24-second news cycle coverage of the campaign? Why else do I have a burning desire to find out what idiotic thing Bill Clinton has said every single day? I know that my anxious energy isn't going to change anything. It really isn't.

And now the race is in Indiana, where I used to live. Now I am about to piss some people off, but I have lived in North Carolina and in Indiana and there is a big ole stretch of Indiana that is the most racist place I have ever lived. We lived in a town for a while that I later learned had a very specific reputation. It was in 1989 that Roland, teaching in the high school, said something positive about someone Jewish and one of his students said, in class, "Are you for the JEWS?" The entire class looked stunned. Roland replied, "Absolutely. I'm for everyone. And you know, there are Jewish people every where they are not really any different from anyone else." One young woman said with anxiety, "There aren't any in OUR school are they?"

We looked a house to rent there and the woman who owned it met us and then apologized for telling us over the phone that she wasn't sure it was available, it was. "I couldn't tell you on the phone because with all these new laws you can't just ask people if they're white, you have to meet them to make sure." We didn't rent from her. We did however live next door to a woman who was HAPPY when I told her that a cross had been burned on the lawn of the Black Cultural Center at Purdue University and confused when I told her that I was going to protest demonstration. There were more of those lawn jockey statues (all black, of course) in that town than I have every seen in my entire life.

Of course I can't do anything about that. My sitting around and wondering if Indianapolis and the land near Chicago will out-vote the People of the Corn won't change a d*mn thing. (Go ahead, flame me in the comments. See if I care. I'm a woman barely holding onto sanity.)

I keep reminding myself that I would be an enthusiastic Hillary Clinton supporter if she had, you know, actually won. Well, enthusiasic if someone would hog-tie Bill and leave him in a barn somewhere. I supported him too, by the way. I just think that having a president whose spouse is a narcissist who will undercut her and embarrass the rest of us is a very, very bad idea. I get these thoughts running around in my head -- like I shouldn't hold Bill against Hillary, but then part of the experience she is ASKING me to judge her on is being his wife, right? So am I only supposed to count the ways in which that is a good thing? Personally I would rather rate her on HER experience.

And just so long as we are clear, she hasn't actually held public office longer than Obama has.

And the only way she can catch up in the popular vote is to count Michigan and Florida and NOT consider caucus participation, which really irritates me to no end. Every time someone talks about the popular vote I feel like a Who from Whoville. I want to round everyone up everyone from the caucus states and get them all to yell together:

"We are here. We are here! We are here!"

I've given you the link to Nora Ephron's "Hooked on Hillary" twice now, but my favorite part has been running through my head. I must quote. "[I]t's turned into an unending last episode of Survivor. They're eating rats and they're frying bugs, and they're frying rats and they're eating bugs; no one is ever going to get off the island and I can't take it any more" (Emphasis most emphatically mine).

***
I feel better now. A little.

I told Roland this morning, after I added The Indianapolis Star and the Charlotte Observer to my favorites so that I can start checking THEM out every day, "You know, maybe I need more stress and anxiety IN the house. I think I am addicted to it. I think I would be better if the agency sent us another kid. I really do."

And he said, "I think you are right."